Having done it, he couldn't do anything else, not for a little while. Not much was open at half-past five.
But there was a Denny's up the street. Suitcases in hand, he trudged toward it. The young, bored-looking Hispanic waitress who seated him gave him a fishy stare. "You coulda left your stuff in the car," she said pointedly.
His answer was automatic: "I don't have a car." Her eyebrows flew upward. If you didn't have a car in L.A., you were nobody. If you didn't have a car and did have suitcases, you were liable to be a dangerously weird nobody. He had to say something. Inspiration struck: "I just got off the train. Somebody should've picked me up, but he blew it. Toast and coffee, please?"
She relaxed. "Okay-coming up. White, rye, or whole wheat?"
"Wheat." Justin looked around. He was the only customer in the place. "Can you keep an eye on the cases for a second? I want to buy a Times." He'd seen the machine out front, but hadn't wanted to stop till he got inside. When the waitress nodded, he got a paper. It was only a quarter. That boggled him; he paid two bucks weekdays, five Sundays.
But the date boggled him more. June 22, 1999. Right on the money. He went back inside. The coffee waited for him, steaming gently. The toast came up a moment later.
As he spread grape jam over it, he glanced at the Times and wondered what his younger self was doing now.
Sleeping, you dummy. He'd liked to sleep late when he was twenty-one, and finals at Cal State Northridge would have just ended. He'd have the CompUSA job to go to, but the place didn't open till ten.
Megan would be sleeping, too. He thought of her lying in a T-shirt and sweats at her parents' house, wiggling around the way she did in bed. Maybe she was dreaming of him and smiling. She would be smiling now. A few years from now… well, he'd come to fix that.
He killed forty-five minutes. By then, the restaurant was filling up. The waitress started to look ticked.
Justin ordered bacon and eggs and hash browns. They bought him the table for another hour. He tried not to think about what the food was doing to his coronary arteries. His younger self wouldn't have cared. His younger self loved Denny's. My younger self was a fool, he thought.
He paid, again marveling at how little things cost. Of course, people didn't make much, either; you could live well on $100,000 a year. He tried to imagine living on $100,000 in 2018, and shook his head. You couldn't do it, not if you felt like eating, too.
When he went out to the parking lot, he stood there for forty minutes, looking back toward the train station. By then, it was getting close to eight o'clock. Up a side street from the Denny's was a block of apartment buildings with names like the Tivoli, the Gardens, and the Yachtsman. Up the block he trudged. The Yachtsman had a vacancy sign.
The manager looked grumpy at getting buzzed so early, but the sight of greenbacks cheered him up in a hurry. He rented Justin a one-bedroom furnished apartment at a ridiculously low rate. "I'm here on business," Justin said, which was true… in a way. "I'll pay three months in advance if you fix me up with a TV and a stereo. They don't have to be great. They just have to work."
"I'd have to root around," the manager said. "It'd be kind of a pain." He waited. Justin passed him two fifties. He nodded. So did Justin. This was business, too. The manager eyed his suitcases. "You'll want to move in right away, won't you?"
Justin nodded again. "And I'll want to use your phone to set up my phone service."
"Okay," the manager said with a sigh.
"Come into my place here. I'll get things set up." His fish-faced wife watched Justin with wide, pale, unblinking eyes while he called the phone company and made arrangements. The manager headed off with a vacuum cleaner. In due course, he came back. "You're ready. TV and stereo are in there."
"Thanks." Justin went upstairs to the apartment. It was small and bare, with furniture that had seen better decades. The TV wasn't new. The stereo was so old, it didn't play CDs, only records and cassettes. Well, his computer could manage CDs. He accepted a key to the apartment and another for the security gates, then unpacked. He couldn't do everything he wanted till he got a phone, but he was here.
He used a pay phone to call a cab, and rode over to a used car lot. He couldn't do everything he wanted without wheels, either. He had no trouble proving he was himself; he'd done some computer forgery before he left to make his driver's license expire in 2003, as it really did. His number hadn't changed.
Security holograms that would have given a home machine trouble here-and-now were a piece of cake to graphics programs from 2018.
His younger self didn't know he'd just bought a new old car: a gray early- 90s Toyota much like the one he was already driving.
"Insurance is mandatory," the salesman said. "I can sell you a policy…" Justin let him do it, to his barely concealed delight. It was, no doubt, highway robbery, especially since Justin was nominally only twenty-one. He'd dressed for the age he affected, in T-shirt and jeans. To him, though, no 1999 prices seemed expensive. He paid cash and took the car.
Getting a bank account wasn't hard, either. He chose a bank his younger self didn't use. Research paid off: he deposited only $9,000. Ten grand or more in cash and the bank would have reported the transaction to the government. He didn't want that kind of notice. He wanted no notice at all. The assistant manager handed him a book of temporary checks. "Good to have your business, Mr. Kloster. The personalized ones will be ready in about a week."
"Okay." Justin went off to buy groceries.
He wasn't a great cook, but he was a lot better than his younger self. He'd had to learn, and had.
Once the groceries were stowed in the pantry and the refrigerator, he left again, this time to a bookstore. He went to the computer section first, to remind himself of the state of the art. After a couple of minutes, he was smiling and shaking his head. Had he done serious work with this junk? He supposed he had, but he was damned if he saw how. Before he was born, people had used slide rules because there weren't any computers yet, or even calculators. He was damned if he saw how they'd done any work, either.
But the books didn't have exactly what he wanted. He went to the magazine rack. There was a MacAddict in a clear plastic envelope. The CD-ROM that came with the magazine would let him start an account on a couple of online services. Once he had one, he could e-mail his younger self, and then he'd be in business.
If I-or I-then-don't flip out altogether, he thought. Things might get pretty crazy. Now that he was here and on the point of getting started, he felt in his belly how crazy they might get. And he knew both sides of things. His younger self didn't.
Would Justin-then even listen to him? He had to hope so. Looking back, he'd been pretty stupid when he was twenty-one. No matter how stupid he'd been, though, he'd have to pay attention when he got his nose rubbed in the facts. Wouldn't he?
Justin bought the MacAddict and took it back to his apartment. As soon as he got online, he'd be ready to roll.
He chose AOL, not Earthlink. His younger self was on Earthlink, and looked down his nose at AOL. And AOL let him pay by debiting his checking account. He didn't have any credit cards that worked in 1999. He supposed he could get one, but it would take time. He'd taken too much time already. He thought he had about three months before the space-time string he'd manipulated would snap him back to 2018. With luck, with skill, with what he knew then that he hadn't known now, he'd be happier there. But he had no time to waste.
His computer, throttled down to 56K access to the outside world, might have thought the same. But AOL's local access lines wouldn't support anything faster. "Welcome," the electronic voice said as he logged on. He ignored it, and went straight to e-mail. He was pretty sure he remembered his old e-mail address. If I don't, he thought, chuckling a little as he typed, whoever is using this address right now will get awfully confused.
He'd pondered what he would say to get his younger self's attention, and settled on the most provocative message he could think of. He wrote, Who but you would know that the first time you jacked off, you were looking at Miss March 1993, a little before your fifteenth birthday? Nobody, right? Gorgeous blonde, wasn't she? The only way I know that is that I am you, more or less. Let me hear from you. He signed it, Justin Kloster, age 40, and sent it.
Then he had to pause. His younger self would be working now, but he'd check his e-mail as soon as he got home. Justin remembered religiously doing that every day. He didn't remember getting e-mail like the message he'd just sent, of course, but that was the point of this exercise.
Waiting till half past five wasn't easy.
He wished he could use his time-travel algorithm to fast-forward to late afternoon, but he didn't dare. Too many superstrings might tangle, and even the office machine up in 2018 hadn't been able to work out the ramifications of that. In another ten years, it would probably be child's play for a computer, but he wouldn't be able to pretend he was twenty-one when he was fifty. Even a baby face and pale gold hair wouldn't stretch that far. He hoped they'd stretch far enough now.
At 5:31, he logged onto AOL again.
"Welcome!" the voice told him, and then, "You've got mail!"
"You've got spam," he muttered under his breath. And one of the messages in his mailbox was spam. He deleted it without a qualm. The other one, though, was from his younger self @earthlink.net.
Heart pounding, he opened the e-mail.
What kind of stupid joke is this? his younger self wrote.
Whatever it is, it's not funny.
Justin sighed. He supposed he shouldn't have expected himself-at-twenty-one to be convinced right away. This business was hard to believe, even for him. But he had more shots in his gun than one. No joke, he wrote back. Who else but you would know you lost your first baby tooth in a pear at school when you were in the first grade? Who would know your dad fed you Rollos when he took you to work with him that day you were eight or nine?
Who would know you spent most of the time while you were losing your cherry staring at the mole on the side of Lindsey Fletcher's neck?
Me, that's who: you at 40. He typed his name and sent the message.
His stomach growled, but he didn't go off and make supper. He sat by the computer, waiting. His younger self would still be online. He'd have to answer… wouldn't he? Justin hadn't figured out what he'd do if himself-at-twenty-one wanted nothing to do with him. The prospect had never crossed his mind.
Maybe it should have.
"Don't be stupid, kid," he said softly.